Those Tijerina boys just don’t quit, do they? They never seem to stop moving, always making music with one band or another — Charlie was in The Factory Party before this, while Pete was in Program, and Springfield Riots after that…
2006’s Food and Liquor prophetically announced the arrival of “the hip-hop generation’s next great vanguard”: Lupe Fiasco. While the rest of the world drenched themselves in the intoxicating and trite gibberish noisily spat of the mouths of Dem Franchize Boyz and Chamillionaire…
Yeah, I know I’m way, way behind on this one… For some reason, the debut 7″ from metal dudes Venomous Maximus has just taken a little while to grow on me. I’m not entirely sure why — this stuff is really and truly up my alley, especially lately…
I know I really should be fairly used to it by now, but for some reason, it still makes me scratch my head a little to hear sounds like this coming out of ultra-urban Brooklyn — sounds that are warm and rootsy and homespun, the kind that’d sound more at home heard through the swinging door of some rural honky-tonky outside of Huntsville…
The main plot of Rubber follows an old, used truck tire rolling down Route 66 encountering typical road-movie types: motel workers, a bored local kid, a local sheriff, and a sultry female in a vintage convertible…
Talk about a transformation. Back when I reviewed The Sour Notes’ Hot Pink Flares 7″, I noted that the band I was listening to was a far cry from the band I’d heard the first time I saw the Notes live, not even a full year before. They’d shifted directions…
Right from the faux-crowd noise intro of “Live in Ruin,” The Energy seem determined to live up to their name, in a big way — they literally barely stop for a breath throughout the rest of second full-length Get Split. The band operates less like an actual band…
New York City synth-pop, New Wave band Cold Cave returned this month with Cherish the Light Years, the follow-up to the band’s debut release Love Comes Close, both out on Matador Records…
More than anything else, Shilpa Ray And Her Happy Hookers’ Teenage and Torture makes me think of a dimly-lit, half-remembered night spent trawling through the seamy, sordid underbelly of some grimy, unnamed Big City, full of pain and lust and exploitation…
It’s funny what a little gender-flipping can do. I remember being bowled over when I first listened to Damone’s classic debut From the Attic, and then hitting the floor a second time when I learned that the songs were originally written by the band’s guitarist…
Pigeons, the sophomore album from Brooklyn-based indie-rock band Here We Go Magic, is a collection of experimental, sometimes trippy songs with unique, interesting sounds similar to a very toned-down Animal Collective…
Something Fierce is out to change the world. Not in any kind of end-world-hunger kind of way, mind you, but still, that’s the feeling I get after listening to Don’t Be So Cruel, the trio’s latest full-length. I mean, sure, they’ve always been about making things better in general…
“Come and watch the pretty lights!” exclaimed the 1966 Pink Floyd poster that inspired producer Derek Vincent Smith to name his electronic music project Pretty Lights in 2006. Four years later, after releasing the two-part Filling Up the City Skies…
Whoa. A gang of legendarily wild, tattooed, hard-drinking dudes from right here in H-town versus a similarly-tattooed, leather-clad trio from Austin, both of which I’ve heard insane party/show stories about? That’d be one hell of a brawl, right there…
Alright, so I’ve got to confess that I’ve got no fucking clue what the difference is between a mixtape and a “real” release, these days, except that (maybe?) you give the former away for free. I mean, look at Das Racist’s Sit Down, Man…
Look, I know definitions change. Hell, I work with words for a living, day in and day out — I’m well aware that a word can mean one thing and then shift into meaning something else. That doesn’t mean, however, that I have to like it…
Someone on this humble blog once called Rugz D Bewler’s “Super Bad” a “truly terrible” track; a song with fantastic minimalist beats that unfortunately “can’t polish lyrical shits” spewed out by Mr. Bewler. That opinionated writer was speaking of Ski Beatz’ 24 Hour Karate School…
Talk about your appropriately-named bands; Philadelphia duo Sun Airway (aka Jon Barthmus and Patrick Marsceill) hit every note it sounds like they should be hitting, from the name, swooping and soaring their way…
After several listens, I have to say that Country Mice’s Make Your Own Damn Fun 7″/EP wins the award for the most schizophrenic musical identity scattered across the fewest number of actual songs. A-side “A Good Old-Fashioned Barn Raising” starts deceptively…
If you squint, Sun Hotel’s Coast almost — almost — sounds like it emerged fully formed out of the Northern woods, full of Gibbard-y solemnity, Arcade Fire grandeur, and Moondoggies atmosphere. Dig deeper, though, and the vibe of the band’s Louisiana home bleeds…
At first blush, Austin band The Bright Light Social Hour’s self-titled debut would sound perfectly at home on just about any classic-rock station you can name, although unlike a lot of their retro-rock contemporaries, they don’t reach backwards to the Stones, Byrds, or Zeppelin…
It is really, truly a different age for making music, folks. Not to get all grandpa-like, but back when I was in a band — which wasn’t that long ago, honestly, in the grand scheme of things — I only knew one band who’d ever put together a video…
Okay, so I’m honestly not sure what this release is, really. I know SF-by-way-of-Canada electro-pop visionaries GOBBLE GOBBLE have two separate 7″s out right now, Wrinklecarver and Lawn Knives, and this pile of songs includes the title tracks of each…
Back when Oxnard-based metalcore dudes The Warriors released their last album, Genuine Sense Of Outrage, I listened and mostly gave a shrug, pushing it off to the side as yet more hardcore-tinged metal pit filler…
What is it about Canada and its proclivity for musical collectives? Black Mountain is yet another, based in Vancouver, with a large regular lineup (check) and an even bigger group of people on records (check). But unlike a similar group who recently performed at the Grammy Awards…
Bunny Gets Paid is Red Red Meat’s best album, and one of the best albums of the ’90s, period. Red Red Meat’s woozy grandeur came to fruition on Bunny Gets Paid, with its warped, thrilling arrangements, its skewed, slightly Beefheartian groove…
With Unite, The Wheel Workers’ Steven Higginbotham definitely starts things off on the right foot. Opener “The Mop” (the title of which may stand for the concept “means of production” or a plain-old, real-live mop, or both, I’m not sure) combines a bouncy, jaunty…
What you have in A Thousand Suns, the fourth studio album from Linkin Park, is a band at a crossroads. After a multitude of multi-platinum albums, remix albums, live albums, and countless EPs for their massive legions of fans…
The first time I heard a John Cage piece, I was floored. Being in a pretty steady post-punk revival phase at the time (give me a break, I was fifteen), the idea of music that was non-melodic was totally foreign to me. Yet when I was confronted with this…
BOAT is a band from Seattle that plays sloppy punk rock music and sings about the most random things. Their sound is kind of like a more punk rock version of The Mountain Goats. The first time I heard the band’s most recent record, Setting the Paces…
I have to hand it to The Literary Greats: the band definitely knows how to keep you on your toes. When they release their second album, Ocean, Meet The Valley, back in 2009, I was surprised then to see/hear how much they’d changed from the sound…
The Silver Seas’ recent album Chateau Revenge seriously runs the emotional gamut. You’ll hear blissful confessions of love, bleak break-up stories, and nostalgia for the way things used to be…
The Terminal Lovers play droney, guitar-heavy psychedelic rock. On As Eyes Burn Clean, they bounce between shorter, poppier songs and longer freak-outs, with lots of epic guitar work, powerful riffs…
There’s something very, very cool about actually getting to hear a band growing up, in the process of finding and evolving and tweaking their particular sound. And believe it or not, it’s a pretty rare thing, at least in the modern, rarefield realm of indie labels…
Okay. I think, finally, that I get it. Up to now, I’d vehemently resisted Gregg Gillis’s primary-colored, seemingly universally-lauded mashup artistry under the Girl Talk moniker, shrugging it off as a neat trick and not much more…
No Age is a D.I.Y experimental/punk band hailing from Los Angeles, California, and consisting of guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Spunt. Their third studio album, Everything In Between, follows a steady trend of honest and sincere records…
When I started this review, I’d initially figured to only write about Netherfriends’ latest release, the free-on-BandCamp album Alap. I cringe to admit it, but I’d let the group’s previous release, last summer’s Barry and Sherry, slip past…
Women plays abrasive, noisy no-wave with strangely catchy, low-key pop hooks. Crafting hooks isn’t something you’d normally associate with students of early Sonic Youth, but this Calgary quartet manages to do just that…
The Washington, D.C. group Apes formed in 1999 and made some high-quality (if a bit unoriginal) psych-rock until their last album, Ghost Games, in 2008. After that album, Apes members Amanda Kleinman, Erick Jackson, and Jeff Schmid reformed…
Hype is a terrible thing — it can push the good into the realm of legendary or relegate the mediocre into something to be despised. On paper, 24 Hour Karate School had all the ingredients to be a spectacular album…
